Sunday, September 29, 2013

Coming together

It's the second to last day of September, which means it's almost October, which means it's almost the last month of work on the house. It's almost time for Rebecca and me to move out of the apartment we've been renting. It's almost time to move into the home we've been owning, but that has, for the last five months, been taken over by (mostly) men with heavy boots and big tools and sharp, clangy things that infuse the very pores of our residence with dust.

We are champing at the bit. And yes, the word is "champing."While the beginning of the job was all about the big picture and upgrades to the structure of the house, now we are into the details. Each day, we can see progress and change.

The downstairs shower is being tiled.

The tile man a-tiling.

The brown trim will actually be the trim that you see

inside the niche. The seat will get a nice stone cover.

The military has been called in to restore order to our upstairs bathroom.

Vanity, thy name is We've Still Got a Ways to Go.

The grate on the deck has been installed, thereby allowing a good amount of light into the new room below.

Before

After

And now we come to the beautiful, exacting and sometimes exasperating task of selecting paint colors.

Jill French, on the left here, is our house painter. She and Rebecca discuss things like hues and saturation.

Eventually, they turn to a higher power for inspiration.

And they receive the Word. Two Words, actually. And the Words are "cloud white." And the walls on either side of the staircase shall be cloud white forevermore.